


When Did You Last Eat?

by WildnessBecomesYou



Category: Ratched (TV)
Genre: Child Abuse, Child Neglect, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD, food insecurity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:42:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27195979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildnessBecomesYou/pseuds/WildnessBecomesYou
Summary: Mildred's always eaten so quickly around Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn isn't sure why, but Mildred is ready to open up about it.
Relationships: Gwendolyn Briggs/Mildred Ratched
Comments: 32
Kudos: 142





	When Did You Last Eat?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SBWomenofMarvel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SBWomenofMarvel/gifts), [ohwellinever](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohwellinever/gifts).



> Fic title taken from the song "Two" by Sleeping At Last,which is so much Gwendolyn loving Mildred that it breaks me. 
> 
> I combined two prompts for this one, because they seemed to fit really well together, I hope y'all don't mind! 
> 
> Also, yeah, angst, and seriously if you have issues with food insecurity you might want to skip this. There's cuddles at the end though. Just, take it easy, take care of yourselves, my loves!

Mildred always finishes eating first. 

(Unless they’re eating oysters, and that’s mostly because she still likes to tease Gwendolyn into feeding her. It’s risky, but she likes the thrill it gives her, and the smirk on Gwendolyn’s face is always delightful.) 

She finishes eating first, and rarely says anything past an “oh?” or “yes” or “well, I would think so.” She listens to Gwendolyn talk and she speeds through meals like she thinks the food might get stolen from her. 

Does she think that?

Gwendolyn nearly asks that as Mildred starts to hiccup at the end of her meal. Instead, she reaches out and pushes her glass of water closer to Mildred. 

“Thank you,” Mildred says, hand covering her mouth. She hiccups again as she lifts the glass. A frustrated look crosses her face, making her features sharper as she tries to hold her breath long enough to take a sip. 

Gwendolyn sighs and Mildred’s face softens into confusion. “You’d have a lot less trouble with this if you savoured your meals a little more.” She hides her smile in her own glass. “Though I don’t blame you for rushing through bologna.” 

Mildred snorts and then immediately hiccups and winces— it looks like it hurts, that series of motions, and she lowers her glass and braces herself against the table. 

“Are you alright, sweetness?” 

Mildred’s shoulders come up for a moment, a smile tugging at her lips. But she finally stretches herself back up.

And then she hiccups. And makes an angry little noise, a half-growl. 

“Mildred, we have got to get you to stop eating so fast,” Gwendolyn sighs. She pops a slice of apple into her mouth, chews thoughtfully as Mildred struggles through another sip of water. 

“I doubt we’ll be able to,” Mildred mutters before another loud _hic!_ takes over her. “I’m too used to this.”

It never fails to take Gwendolyn by surprise when she admits these things. It never fails to hurt her, either, leave her head swimming with regret that she hadn’t found Mildred earlier, been able to protect her from the horrors of the world. Guilt that she hadn’t endured such a hard life. Gratitude that Mildred is finally showing her these things, desire to make that pain go away, never threaten her happiness again. 

But silence isn’t good for these moments, so she finishes chewing, swallows, murmurs, “Are you?”

Mildred glances up, then back down at her empty plate. Her fingers press anxious circles in her glass. “It… it was hard, at homes, to know— to be able to count on food.” Gwendolyn knows her eyes betray just how she hurts for the young girl Mildred still carries in her bones, because Mildred swallows painfully and rises from the table to wash her dishes. “We— there were some houses where we would have very little to eat at all. We’d get so hungry that eating more than a few bites would make us sick.” 

Gwendolyn hides her fists under the table. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to—“ 

“No, it’s okay,” Mildred says as she scrubs gently at her plate, as if there were ever more than breadcrumbs on it. “It’s… those houses were better than the ones who would time us.”

“Time you?” Gwendolyn has a hunch what that might mean, and she doesn’t want it to be true, doesn’t want to have the urge to hunt down these monsters and punish them, but she can tell Mildred needs to say it all. 

“They would put down a good amount of food,” Mildred says, “and then they’d tell us— “You have five minutes to eat,” or however long they decided we could have.” She pauses as she rises the dish. Gwendolyn can see her hands shaking. “So Edmund and I, we’d just scarf down as much as we could. Once, Edmund tried to hide some food for us later. When they—“ she chokes off for a moment. 

Gwendolyn rises and comes to her side. “Incoming,” she breathes, places a hand on the small of Mildred’s back. Mildred sways towards her. 

“When they realized what he’d done, the man, he took— he took his wife’s wooden spoon and smacked it across Edmund’s jaw until he bled.” 

Her voice trembles. Gwendolyn wants to pull her close, but that wouldn’t help now. So she waits instead, trying to keep her hand steady at Mildred’s back. She takes the plate with her free hand and places it aside to dry. 

“Of course, there were the houses that would give us enough to survive, but not more. They would use the food stamps the county gave them for themselves, too, squirrel away the money that came with being a foster parent for fancy watches or a TV or something for their actual children.” 

Mildred pauses. Gwendolyn registers that her hiccups are gone. Her hands grip at the sink. She starts to clean the cutting board and knife that Gwendolyn had used when cutting apples for the two of them. “There were— one or two houses where there were just so many children,” she continues, and she’s breathless, and her voice is tight, and Gwendolyn wants to take that pain away. But this is how Mildred sheds that pain, so she listens. “The older ones, we’d always cut back on what we ate, so the younger ones would have something. At one house, there was this boy named Billy. Billy and I, we would give the others our shares of meat, eat the potatoes or corn or whatever else was there, and then when the other kids were asleep, we’d try to find berries or mushrooms we could eat.” 

“That was very resourceful of you,” Gwendolyn murmurs, and Mildred shrugs. 

“We had to survive. So did the young ones. I don’t know if I blame those people, the ones who had too many kids, I don’t— I don’t think they meant to be that way, but they took on too much.” 

“That can still hurt you.”

“No, I know,” Mildred mumbles. “I just don’t think they did it on purpose. They weren’t intentionally hurting us.”

Gwendolyn doesn’t press that one further. She takes the knife from Mildred’s shaky hands, rinses it off, places it by the plate. She waits for the rest of the story. 

Mildred seems to hang on the words for a few moments. “By the time Edmund and I were in that… last house together, well.” She chuckles darkly and gestures over her own body. “There hadn’t been enough to help _fill out_ my body.” 

Gwendolyn frowns, clenches the hand not on Mildred in a fist out of view. “Mildred.”

Mildred shrugs again, as if this isn’t all horrifying. “I guess it wasn’t enough for the people that watched us, because we probably ate the best we ever had at that house. But it didn’t really make a difference, and I guess I started to associate those big meals with that basement theater. And after that I wasn’t really able to eat big meals anyways— it was… two weeks? Before they found me in the forest, and by then I was in a different county, and I went into a different system, with all the same problems as the last one.” 

Gwendolyn can’t speak. She makes a note to never take her to a four-course meal, or anything bigger than just dinner and dessert. Her heart aches with the thought of Mildred fearing abundance, when abundance is what she deserves— abundance of love, of care, of rest and all the good things in life. She shouldn’t fear those things. She should be excited for them. 

Mildred is still going, though, staring at her own reflection in the glass of the window above the sink. “And then, of course, there was no time to eat in the Army. There was always too much to do, too many people to try and save, and eating when you’d failed—“ 

“You didn’t fail anyone,” Gwendolyn interrupts, unable to stop herself. Mildred raises a hand and closes her eyes, setting her lips in a solid line. Gwendolyn falls silent. 

“When we’d failed those boys, and their mothers and wives and sweethearts back home… it didn’t feel like we deserved to eat.”

Gwendolyn can’t stop herself. She’s been so patient, and she’d controlled herself up till now, but she can’t stop herself from pulling Mildred closer. She wraps her arms around Mildred’s shoulders, giving her an out just in case— Mildred can easily duck out of this hold. 

But she doesn’t; she wraps her arms around Gwendolyn’s waist, nuzzles into Gwendolyn’s neck. 

“You know what we always had in those rations, though?” she asks, and it’s muffled by Gwendolyn’s skin, but she hears it anyways. 

“What did you have?” 

There’s an almost rueful laugh that comes with the answer. “Spam.” 

Gwendolyn snorts. She squeezes Mildred to her for a moment. “That doesn’t quite explain the bologna,” she ribs gently. 

“You don’t have to cook it,” Mildred says. “And it… tastes a little like spam. But without that— without the ashy taste.” She shrugs again, and Gwendolyn feels that more than she sees it. “Maybe that was just the bombs, though.” 

Gwendolyn squeezes her eyes shut so the tears don’t roll out, so she doesn’t start crying everywhere. Mildred has endured too much. 

Mildred isn’t hiccuping anymore. She’s just breathing, and she feels exhausted against Gwendolyn, and Gwendolyn can only be the lifeboat in this tormented ocean of this poor woman’s life. 

“It does pretty okay if it’s taken out of the fridge for a while,” Mildred adds, “so I can come back to it if I get interrupted by a patient or an emergency. Assuming Betsy doesn’t eat it first.” 

Gwendolyn chuckles at that. Betsy couldn’t know, doesn’t know, these reasons why Mildred rushes through food. She’d once mentioned how her earlier interactions with Mildred had been tinged with the _peach debacle,_ as she called it. Betsy wouldn’t understand why that’d been such a big deal, so Gwendolyn can’t blame her. She can only hope the woman steals food a little less. Even if she isn’t thinking about how insecure everyone else might be about whether that food will even be there. 

Mildred squeezes her once and sighs, and Gwendolyn turns to press a kiss to her forehead. “Thank you, for telling me about all that.”

Mildred sounds uncomfortable when she mutters, “It’s all so dark. It doesn’t seem like something you should want to hear.”

“I don’t…hmm.” Gwendolyn takes a moment to compose herself. “I don’t like hearing you in pain. I usually want to go do something awful to all the people in your stories for making you suffer like that,” she admits. 

“Anna didn’t do anything wrong,” Mildred says quickly. 

“I know,” Gwendolyn says, pushing a hand into Mildred’s hair and scrunching at it softly. She feels Mildred’s eyelashes flutter against her skin. “But knowing your pain is important, because otherwise I don’t know how to help you.” 

Mildred doesn’t respond, not vocally. She holds tighter to Gwendolyn and breathes deeply. 

Eventually she does lift her head, though, looking up at Gwendolyn. “It does… well it doesn’t feel good to say these things, but it helps, a bit. I think.” She grows uncertain at the end, and Gwendolyn leans down to brush their noses together. 

“I love you, Mildred, and that means all of you.”

Mildred’s shoulders come up a bit, but they relax quickly, and she tilts her head up like a cat stretching in a sunbeam. 

“I love you. All of you.” 

Gwendolyn smiles, presses a kiss to Mildred’s nose. “C’mon, sweetness, let’s go light a fire.”

**Author's Note:**

> How y'all doin? Two fics left until Longfic! Drop me a line below <3


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